Chapter One

The sound of the battle stations klaxon jolted ensign Myra Brun
awake. The blaring sound wasn’t the nicest way to wake up, but it was
effective. She rolled out of her bunk and hit the floor standing, wide
awake. The leggy blonde moved with a speed and precision that spoke of
many hours of practice, not to mention a high level of fitness and
coordination. At 1.78 meters (5 feet 10 inches) she was tall, with a
lean athletic look. She ran a hand thru her short hair and looked at the
clock on the wall. She groaned to herself, only three hours of sleep.
But there was no time to find out if this was a drill or a real
emergency. The assumption in the military was always that it was a real
emergency. She threw open a locker door and pulled out a space suit.
Dark blue, with a single silver strip on the cuffs, the tight fitting
suit had a connector for her wrist comm. Pockets everywhere and a small
pack on the back, containing air tanks. The other two bunks in the room
were empty, so she didn’t have to worry about bumping into anyone as she
put on her suit. One of the other ensigns she shared the room with would
be in engineering. He was on first watch and it was his regular duty
station. The third junior officer would be on his way to the missile
magazine and the fire control station there. The small ship, the
six-hundred-ton Oslo-class corvette Jorvik, didn’t even have an
emergency bridge, much less a dedicated fire control center or damage
control for that matter. In fact, Myra’s duty station would be standing
in the hallway outside of engineering. At least until something needed
to be fixed. She was on damage control/security when an alert sounded
during first watch. As was typical of Sword World naval ships, even the
smallest, the Jorvik’s crew was divided into three watches. The watch on
duty manned the bridge and engineering. The next watch was off duty,
while the last watch slept. During an emergency, the off-duty watch
would man the ship’s weapons and re-enforce the bridge or engineering.
The sleeping watch would handle damage control and if needed, defend the
ship against boarders.

After she finished dressing, including tools and a handgun, she
grabbed her helmet and hurried to her post, in the hallway. It wasn’t
far, of course; on a ship this small, nothing was far. On top of that,
the Jorvik was, like most Sword Worlder designs, a tight, cramped ship.
When she arrived, it looked like everyone was there: two petty officers,
and six able spacers. So, she keyed her comm and reported “Bridge,
damage control ready.” After a brief acknowledgement the captain
announced over all comm channels, “All stations ready, depressurize the
ship.” Myra sealed her helmet and hooked a carabiner on her belt to one
of the safety lines on the wall. She looked to make sure the others were
also ready. Pressurized spacecraft were basically metal balloons. If
they got a hole, like from a laser or missile hit, the air tended to
explode out. Removing the air prevented that. It also helped prevent
fires onboard. No air, no fire. Her suit started to stiffen as the
pressure began to drop. From this point on, only sickbay would have air.

With her immediate responsibilities taken care of, she brought up her
heads-up display and started to find out what was going on. She called
up a mirror of the ship’s tactical display. They had been patrolling
near the only gas giant in the system. Singer was a poor system, with a
fairly low level of technology, about where Earth was at the dawn of
pre-stellar space flight. So while they had rockets and could build
nukes, they couldn’t even detect anything much beyond their own world’s
orbit. That’s why the Jorvik was there. The ship was a mercenary (on
paper, anyway), hired by the governments of Singer to patrol and defend
the parts of their star system that they couldn’t. The reality was, they
were a ship of the Sword Worlds Confederation Navy. The confederation
had created a ‘mercenary’ force called the Viking Legion. The name had
caused a lot of concern amongst their neighbors at first. Especially
since the Sword Worlders were, mostly, descendants of the original
Vikings from old Earth. People feared that they were looking to restart
old, bad habits, in spite of the fact that those ancestors had been
civilized by the rest of Earth’s standards for … well, call it well over
2,000 years by the time starflight was possible.

But after almost sixty years, the Viking Legion had earned an
honorable reputation. They were yet to sack a monastery or raid a
defenseless village. Just the opposite, they spent almost their entire
time defending others—from infantry platoons guarding small settlements,
to squadrons of starships protecting vulnerable star systems. The Viking
Legion was the force to call for reasonably-priced protection. The Sword
World Confederation got more than money out of it, though. The army,
navy and marines got priceless real world experience for their
personnel. And the Government got even more priceless good will and
political capital.

At the moment, this got the Jorvik and her crew into a dangerous
position. Being dirt poor meant the Singer system wasn’t able to afford
much. Aside from some upgrades to their planetary defenses, all they
could afford was one ship to patrol the outer system. This meant the
Jorvik was on its own. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem. The Singer
system was out-of-the-way, with not much worth stealing. Unfortunately,
in this day and age, not all threats operated by what humans would
recognize as logic. What the MSS (Mercenary Star Ship) Jorvik had
spotted refueling in the gas giant was one such threat: A vampire ship.

These days, a vampire ship didn’t mean a ship full of blood-drinking
undead. It was something much worse: a ship whose computers had been
taken over by the artificially intelligent virus that had destroyed
countless worlds. The ultimate weapon that had ended the last Imperial
civil war by ending the Imperium—and most of Charted Space. And most
living things, for that matter, in the areas it had taken over. This was
THE VIRUS, all caps, run-and-hide-or-fight-for-your-life Virus. And it
had come to Singer.

Undoubtedly, the controlling artificial intelligence had its reasons
for coming to this unimportant backwater. Most likely it had come to
destroy or enslave a vulnerable world of hated organic life forms. How
it had managed to get this far past the heavily-defended frontiers was a
better question. While the frontiers were guarded as well as possible,
there were gaps. And a clever enemy could get through. It happened on
occasion; the Virus-controlled ships were beyond clever, after all. The
major powers in the area usually kept it secret, so as not to cause
panic. But it was rare these days for one to pass the frontiers. And
getting this far past the frontier without anyone noticing was rarer
still. Singer was literally months travel from the closest border. At
the moment, though, none of that really mattered. What mattered was that
it was here. And the only thing stopping the vampire ship from standing
off at a distance and bombarding singer into the Stone Age was the MSS
Jorvik and her crew.

When the Jorvik had first spotted an unscheduled ship skimming
hydrogen for fuel in the gas giant’s atmosphere it had moved to
investigate. As they got closer they saw it was a Broadsword-class
mercenary cruiser. At eight hundred tons it wasn’t much larger than
Jorvik. And a fellow mercenary. At least that was what they thought
until they tried to communicate with it. The reply to their hails was a
compressed data package. Which drove the comm station insane and set off
every viral alarm it had. Fortunately, according to the standard
antivirus protocols, the comm station wasn’t connected to anything else
on the ship. In fact it even had it’s own independent power supply.
Simply shutting the comm station’s power down and switching to the
backup stopped the infection from spreading to the rest of the ship. But
then the intruder had turned and started to head toward them. Battle was
about to be joined.

The Broadsword-class ships were an old design, built by the Imperium
to transport small units of mercenaries and act as general purpose
warships. They were mediocre at best at most tasks, including
ship-to-ship combat. But being taken over by Virus gave it several
advantages: after over seventy years, most of the vampire ships had
replaced their human crews with robots, direct computer control or more
often a combination of the two. Most of them had also upgraded their
systems as much as possible. This meant they usually had the best
sensors and electronics possible. Consequently they reacted like
lightning and their weapon fire was literally inhumanly accurate.

The smaller Oslo-class corvettes had their own advantages, though:
They were designed for space combat against an opponent that outnumbered
them and had higher technology. To offset these disadvantages they were
as heavily armed and armored as possible. It was one of the reasons
Sword Worlder ships tended to be so cramped and Spartan for the crews.
They sacrificed comfort for combat power and protection.

As Myra watched the two ships began launching missiles at each other,
Jorvik’s eight launchers verses the enemies sixteen. The humans had
something else in their favor though. One of Jorvik’s weapon mounts was
a large dual particle accelerator turret, a powerful system for such a
small ship. More importantly, the two energy canons were much longer
ranged then the more standard laser weapons. Lasers had their uses. At
short range they could be devastating. They were also used in a
defensive role, to stop attacking missiles. Lasers were also cheaper;
the corvette had eight of them, mounted in two turrets. Soon the lasers
would be used to try and destroy the missiles headed towards them. But
before either ship’s missiles could reach their targets, the particle
accelerators opened fire. Myra would watch as long as she could, soon
she would be too busy trying to repair damage.

As the battle developed, it was clear the two ships were evenly
matched. Jorvik’s missiles couldn’t get through the vampire’s defensive
fire. But while Jorvik couldn’t stop all of the vampires missiles, the
missiles couldn’t penetrate her armor. They had to hit the same spots
over and over again in order to wear down the corvette’s thick hide. But
they had plenty of missiles to do just that. On the other hand, Jorvik’s
accelerators could punch through the other ship’s armor at will. But the
two weapons fired as one. Which meant they could only hit one thing at a
time. And the larger ship had more targets to hit. Eventually both ships
pounded each other into wrecks. The vampire ran out of functioning
weapons and its maneuver drive gave out. But its last missile volley
managed to score a direct hit on Jorvik’s power plant. They were both
drifting in space. The scrappy defender and the inhuman monster glared
at each other as they slowly tumbled away from each other. Each waiting
to see who could repair themselves enough to finish off the other first.